[unreadable] The objectives of the Center of Biomedical Research Excellence in Women's Health (COBRE-WH) are to deepen our understanding of the unique role of gender and female reproductive hormones in the manifestation of health and disease and use this multi-disciplinary focus as a platform to develop research teams, comprised of senior and junior level investigators, capable of successfully competing for NIH grant support as independent research centers. We will achieve these objectives by: (1) assembling a cadre of junior and senior level scientists, paired together as a research team, to examine timely and important questions related to gender, reproductive hormones, and hormone action, (2) providing junior faculty with state-of-the-art multidisciplinary training in concepts relevant to women's health, (3) mentoring junior faculty in research projects focused on women's health that will insure that they successfully establish independent NIH-funded research careers, (4) supporting shared core facilities to optimize use by COBRE-WH faculty in cutting edge methods, and (5) building research teams that will be competitive for extramural funding to establish stand alone Centers. A critical challenge for the COBRE-WH during the next funding period is to become an independent, extramurally supported Center(s). To meet this challenge, we have structured our COBRE-WH program in a manner that we will have 5 "research teams" or projects that interact with each other in terms of concepts and methods. Each project will be directed by a senior investigator that will incorporate current or previous COBRE-WH supported junior investigators into the project. These research projects are included because they attack critical questions in women's health. Thus, junior investigators will be mentored by established, NIH-funded faculty who utilize a broad spectrum of state-of-the-art integrative, clinical, cellular and molecular approaches to probe critical questions in women's health research. This organizational structure will insure that the proposed COBRE-WH program will meet the challenge of increasing the NIH-funded research in the Commonwealth of Kentucky while pursuing the goal of developing the COBRE-WH into as many as 3 separate, yet interactive independent program projects or Centers. [unreadable] [unreadable]